Peanut Butter Cupcakes

Why I Love This Recipe

Peanut butter - it's one of those forever loved flavours, and there is something special about having a peanut butter base that allows you to recreate peanut butter & strawberry or chocolate flavours in the cute little package of a cupcake!

If you decide to fill them (and I HIGHLY recommend you do), you can find filling suggestions as well as recipes for a strawberry cream cheese frosting and chocolate whipped cream on my food blog.

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C, then beat together the butter, brown sugar and peanut butter till creamy, then add the eggs and vanilla and beat till smooth.

2. Set aside the batter, and sift together the flour, bicarb soda and baking powder.

3. Fold the flour into the batter in three parts, alternating with the buttermilk. Spoon into cases (I got about 20 cupcakes with each weighing about 40g) and bake for 20 minutes, or till a wooden skewer inserted into the cupcakes comes out with moist (not wet) crumbs.

4 Once baked, set the cupcakes on a wire rack to cool, then proceed to fill and decorate however you wish.

For PB & J cupcakes – fill the cupcakes with the strained strawberry jam and set aside. Mix up your strawberry cream cheese frosting, ice the cupcakes and decorate with a few silver cachous.

For chocolate cupcakes – mix up your ganache, then beat your cream till it almost reaches firm peaks (if you beat it till it reaches firm peaks like I did, it will take on a curdled appearance as you work in the chocolate.)

6. Reserve about 1/2 cup of ganache and use the remaining amount to pipe into the cooled cupcakes as filling. Use a large metal spoon to slowly and carefully fold the chocolate ganache into the whipped cream, until it is no longer streaky and has been properly worked in. Ice your cupcakes, dust with cocoa powder and decorate with a few silver cachous :)

Now, these cupcakes do develop a fairly hard crust so I would suggest icing them at least a few hours (and up to 24hrs) before serving as this will help soften the crust. However, in the case of the chocolate whipped cream, they would need to be refrigerated – and you certainly would not want to keep the icing longer than 24 hours at most.